Another Challenge to Myself

Copied below is what was put out by Barnes and Noble today.  I am feeling quite ashamed to admit that I have read none of the nominated books on this longlist.  Which means when the shortlist is announced, I will not have read any...unless I can get some read before the shortlist is revealed.  Of course, then it is a guess (for me) which ones will be on the shortlist, so how do I know which to read before then???  Let me know if you have read any of these and tell me your recommendations!

"Book award season is upon us! Last week, under a new set of rules, the National Book Awards released four nominee longlists for the first time ever. This is fantastic news for book-lovers, as it gives us a chance to sample the work of double the authors. Without further ado, the talented authors who were recognized by the association:

Fiction:

• Pacific, by Tom Drury
• The End of the Point, by Elizabeth Graver
• The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner
• The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri
• A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra
• The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
• Someone, by Alice McDermott
• Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon
• Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders
• Fools: Stories, by Joan Silber

Nonfiction:

• Finding Florida: The True Story of the Sunshine State, by T.D. Allman
• Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami, by Gretel Ehrlich
• The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA, by Scott C. Johnson
• Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore
• Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, by Wendy Lower
• Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 by James Oakes
• The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer
• The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832, by Alan Taylor
• Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, by Terry Teachout
• Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright"

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley was the August choice of one of my book groups.  It is rampant with symbolism, of which I am sure I missed a great deal of.  It may be a book that I will have to re-read at some point to discover all that I missed!

Evelyn Roe lived on her family's farm in North Carolina, where near the end of World War II, she came across what appeared to be a severely burned soldier buried in the mud.  She, of course, rescued him  and very soon realized that he was not an ordinary man.  First of all, his burns healed almost immediately, and then he became the image of Evelyn...a woman who looked just like her.  Evelyn called her "Addie".  As time went on, Addie realized that Evelyn wanted to marry and have a family, so she went off for awhile, then returned as a man...Adam.  They fell in love, married, and over the years had five daughters and built a horse-training business.

It was, at times, perhaps often, difficult for Evelyn to cover for their unusual secret, and eventually, following a terrible loss, they moved from the community to start over.  Over the years, it became evident that Evelyn was moving into middle age, but Adam was not, and Evelyn began to struggle with how this could be explained to others as she and Adam got older, with his appearance never changing, but hers getting aged.  Then one day, Adam disappeared.

This is, of course, a very brief summary of the book.  I initially had a hard time getting into the book, but there is something mysterious enough going on, that it kept my interest and I did become involved in it.  By the end of the book, I really liked it.  However, it is not a book that I would easily recommend to anyone.  There is much that is not explained in the story, and you just have to go with it.  That can sometimes be hard for one (me included), but if one can get past that, it's a good story!

Catching up on my summer reading

I have read several books since The Human Stain, but none have compared to it so far...yet, I keep trying!

I have read four books lately:

Stoner by John Williams.  I did enjoy this book and I do recommend it.  At face value, it appears to be

a quite simple story:  boy (William Stoner) grew up poor living on a farm in Missouri in the late 1800's.  His teacher recommended that he go on to the university, so his parents managed to send him there to study agronomy.  However, as he began to take the various courses, he found that English literature was what he wanted to study.  Of course, that meant that he would not be returning to the farm to help his father which was a disappointment to his parents.  Then he married a city-bred girl from money, and began teaching at the university.  That further estranged him from his family.  Stoner and his wife had a difficult marriage, and his wife worked at separating Stoner from their only child, Grace.  Stoner's life was a lonely, isolated sad life.  Until he met Katherine.  Stoner then found what love was about, of course, at the price of the rest of his life.  And as the back of the book states:

"Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude."

Good story, good writing.  Side note: the book was written in 1965.

Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick.  I wasn't real taken with this novel, although I did

finish it, I guess, because I cared enough to find out how the story ended.  This is a story about Charlie Beale, who was a veteran of WWII and who showed up one day in the small town of Brownsburg, Virginia with a suitcase full of cash and a set of butcher knifes.  He went to Will, the local butcher, and convinced Will to give Charlie a try.  Charlie was a good butcher so he was given a job.  Meanwhile, Charlie bought property near the river where he was sleeping out of his truck.  As Charlie and the Will worked together, Charlie also became friends with Will's wife and five year old son, Sam.

Charlie seemed to be searching for a wonderful life.  He attended all of the churches, trying to find one that felt right for him.  He continued to buy up land. And then, he fell hard for the young, beautiful wife of one of the old, wealthy men in town.  Charlie and Sylvan began an extramarital affair.  Charlie bought Sylvan a house, and they would meet there to be alone.  Except that Charlies always took Sam everywhere he went, leaving the five year old boy confused and wondering what Charlie was doing.

The book ends tragically.

It is fairly well-written, but left some things unanswered that perhaps needed to be explained, like who was Charlie really?  Where did his money come from?  Etc.

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle.  This was one of my book groups choice for August.  It was an
amusing story, but didn't hold my interest real well.  It is a novel about a few residents of an independent living home, Pine Haven Retirement Center, in a small town in North Carolina, as they near the end of their lives.  Being who I am, I wanted to know much more about each person's story, so that was disappointing to me.  However, the author does a good job in such a short space of letting you know about each character.  I just wanted more!  Besides the residents of the facility, there are a couple of the staff that are also in the book.  Their lives intertwine with the residents in interesting ways, and serve to show the contrast of stages of life.

Perhaps, it is just me that didn't find the book that great...dealing with aging parents could do that!

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier.  I did enjoy this book quite a bit.  It was rather simple, yet there was a lot to it.

In 1850, Hannah Bright, a seamstress and Quaker from England, was struggling with the recent

break-up with her fiance who decided to marry someone else.  Hannah's sister, Grace, was scheduled to travel to America to marry Adam Cox, so Hannah decided to travel with Grace and start a new life for herself.  Sadly, Grace died on the ship they were traveling on, so Hannah arrived in America alone.  She made her way to Ohio where she would have to tell Adam the news that Grace had died.  When Hannah arrived in Faithwell, Ohio where Adam lived, she learned that Adam was living with his sister-in-law, who had been married to Adam's brother who had recently died.  Hannah moved into the house with them, until she met Jacob Haymaker, a local farmer, who wanted to marry her.  Hannah did not feel like she belonged anywhere and so agreed to marry Jacob.  That meant that Hannah had to move to the family home where Jacob's mother, Ruth, ruled. And Ruth did not care for Hannah, so that made life difficult as Hannah attempted to fit into the family.

Hannah had learned about the Underground Railway when she first arrived in Ohio, and she slowly became aware of activities that were going on.  As she began to notice travelers hiding, she began to help those traveling on their way to Canada ( or up north).  Her mother-in-law learned of Hannah's activities and forebade her to help anyone.

The story is about the struggle of speaking of one's beliefs, and actually living that belief.  It was quite a good story of the years before the Civil War, as slavery was pervasive in the South and the slaves were trying to escape.

The Human Stain

The Human Stain by Phillip Roth is one of the best books that I have ever read.  That is really high

praise coming from me-I have read a lot of books. 

The opening line is perfect to lead into the story:

"It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk---who before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty---confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college."

 It turns out that this was not the first time that Coleman was involved in "scandulous behavior".  His retirement from Athena College came about when he was accused of racism after it became known that he had questioned in class one day "Do they exist or are they spooks?" about a couple of students who had never shown up for his class.  Unbeknownst to Coleman, the missing students were black.  Those who wanted to get rid of Coleman jumped on the wagon, and he was forced out. This part of the story seemed weak to me, but it was also quite meaningful as it turned out.

Following his retirement/forced resignation, Coleman's wife died (which he felt was caused by the charges of racism that were charged upon him and the subsequent ostracism of him by the college).  Thus as the opening line tells, Coleman began an affair with Faunia Farley, an illiterate, divorced woman, who had lost her two children in a fire.  She had been abused as a child and as a wife, so she came into the relationship with her own issues.

Coleman's neighbor, a writer named Nathan Zuckermann is the narrator of the story, beginning to end.  He came across Coleman life secret that Coleman had kept for over fifty years...kept from his wife and his four children, and all who knew him.  The secret that was Coleman's life.  The secret that he only told Faunia...and her reaction was a kind of "So?".  This secret that had become Coleman's identity, as it always had been from the start anyway.

I don't want to give away the secret.  But as it turns out, it's implications are stunning.

I read this book for one of my book groups.  We had a wonderful night of discussion!  There is just so much to this story.

Defending Jacob

I had been wanting to read Defending Jacob by William Landay for awhile, so I was glad that my book

group decided to chose it for our July read.  It is the story of a family torn apart as old truths and new accusations come to light.

The Barber family consisted of Andy, an Assistant District Attorney, Laurie, his artistic wife, and their fourteen year old son, Jacob.  One of Jacob's schoolmates, Ben,  was found brutally murdered in a city park and Andy was called to the scene.  Andy decided to lead the investigation into the stabbing and began to suspect a known pedophile who lived near the park.  However, soon some of Jacob's classmates began posting messages on Facebook about Jacob and his problems with Ben and it became known that Jacob had a "cool knife".  Police began to suspect Jacob of the murder.  Meanwhile, Andy found the knife that Jacob had and he disposed of it.  Because he thought Jacob was guilty, or because he didn't want the knife to hurt Jacob's case because he was innocent? 

Jacob's mother, Laurie, suspected that perhaps Jacob did commit the murder and, understandably, this caused a serious rift in Andy and Laurie's relationship.  That rift widened when Laurie learned that both Andy's father and his grandfather had been murderers and that his father was still in prison-facts that Andy had never shared with his family.

So, how far do you go to protect your children?  That's the gist of the book.  Very reminiscent for me of The Dinner, which I had read a couple of months ago.

The first half of the book went slowly for me, but picked up after that.  I was of the opinion that it was just a pretty good book.  Until the end.  The end pushed the book into the "very good" category for me!  A very unexpected ending!  Certainly a thought-provoking book!

And, by the way, lent itself to a good discussion for book group!

Wilderness

Wilderness is the debut novel of Lance Weller.  I look forward to more novels from this author! I am a

little biased in that I love novels concerning the Civil War and this is a little more than just about the War in that it is also dealing with the aftermath of the War.

The novel begins with a Prologue titled "Rise Again 1965".  A woman, Jane, woke in her nursing home, remembering her three fathers:

"The man who was her father for five years and who was killed along with her mother high in the mountains.  And Jane Dao-ming sees again her second father, Abel Truman, who found her there and who brought her down and whom she knew for two days and who gave her vision to replace sight.  By the window in her studio, her breath comes hot and catches high in her chest to think of him and of her third and final father, who raised her with her second and final mother.  This third father, Glenn Makers, who adopted her and taught her what she's need to know to survive in a sighted world-arithmetic and how an apple feels when ripe and sweet and how the quality of light differs by season and by temperature-and who was hanged by the neck until dead from the branches of a black cottonwood on the banks of the Little Sugar Creek by a man named Farley for the simple reason that he was a black man with a white wife."

 She recalls asking Glenn, her third father, about Abel Truman.  Glenn told her:

"Skin started it," he finally told her.  "That war.  You know that.  Skin started it, but there was more to it than just skin, and even though Abel fought for what he fought for, you can't take a man out of his time then expect to understand him.  That's just not something you can do.  Like the war, there was more to him than just the side he was on."

Great Prologue! 

The novel is the story of Abel Truman, who had fought for the Confederacy, and headed to the Pacific after the War, trying to get away from all the memories and feelings. The story goes back and forth between 1864 and 1899.  In 1864 Abel had fought at the Battle of the Wilderness, where he was severely wounded.  In 1899, Abel was nearing the end of his life.  Before the War had started Abel had lost his infant daughter and his wife.  Those losses, along with his experiences during the War, haunted him for the rest of his life. Redemption figures in both times...from 1864 Abel comes to the realization that fighting a war over color of skin is wrong, and from 1899 Abel told a story of being human and surviving, along with caring for others.

The novel tells of an old soldier's heading "home", retelling his story and memories, good and bad.   I thought the writing was superb.  Great story!

Three Books Recommended by Friends

I recently completed reading three books recommended by various friends.  And while they were all good stories, none of the three really grabbed me.  I guess my taste is different from many others?  I don't know...it could be that I had just come off reading two very excellent books, and so these three didn't seem to meet the standard of the two before???  So readers, that may mean that you will find these three books to be quite good, so don't let my take on them slant or influence your decision to read them or not.

First one-The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.  I did enjoy this book until the very end,

when I felt as if it ended all too perfectly for the main character, Victoria.

Victoria was a young girl/woman who had grown up in the foster care system.  When she aged out of the system, she was alone, trusting no one and living out on the street.  She realized that perhaps her love for flowers and the meaning of flowers could be put to use in a flower shop.  As a child, she had received a book that had the meaning of flowers and she seemed to have a gift for using that knowledge.  So when she observed a woman who appeared to own a flower shop nearby, she offered her services.  However, while doing the early morning shopping at the Flower Market, she noticed a boy about her age and as they began to get to know each other, she learned that he was a connection to her past that she did not want to remember.  Now Victoria was faced with the dilemma of facing her painful past or letting go of her chance of happiness with Grant (the boy).

As I said, it was a good story, just ended too predictably.  We did end up having a good discussion about the book at book group...lots to examine as far as the foster care system and how that can affect a person's life, etc..And I forgot to add that at the end of the book is "Victoria's Dictionary of Flowers", which I found fascinating!

Next I read The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker.  I did like this book, and the

ending  had a bit of a twist, which was a nice surprise!

Here's how the story started:

"The old man's eyes struck me first.  They rested deep in their sockets, and he seemed unable to take them off me.  Granted, everyone in the teahouse was staring at me more or less unabashedly, but he was the most brazen.  As if I were some exotic creature he'd never seen before."

Julia had gone to Burma to learn more about her father who had disappeared four years earlier.  She did not know much about his earlier life, other than he was Burmese, had come to America, and  married her mother.  He worked as an attorney.  When Julia arrived in Burma, the old man approached her and said:

"Julia Win. Born August 28, 1968, in New York City.  American mother.  Burmese father.  Your family name is a part of my story, has been a part of my life since I was born.  In the past four years I have not passed a single day without thinking of you.  I will explain everything in due course but let me first ask you my question: Do you believe in love?"

Julia's mother had given her a letter that had been written by her father in 1955 to a woman named Mi Mi.  The letter was addressed to Kalaw, a village in Burma.  The letter is all that Julia has to link her father to his past, so she leaves for Burma in search of her father, or news of him.  The old man, U Ba, approached her and began to tell her stories about her father, including his blindness as a child, and his love and devotion to Mi Mi. Mi Mi is unable to walk.  She became Tin Win's eyes, and he became her legs.  When Julia arrived in Burma, it had been 50 years since Tin Win had left Burma.

There was wisdom in this book.  At one point, Tin Win was being taken to a monastery by his "adopted" mother to learn from an eighty year old blind monk...

"Sy Kyi was hoping he would be able to take Tin Win under his wing, too, to coax him out of the darkness that beleaguered him, to teach him what he had taught her: that life is interwoven with suffering.  That in every life, without exception, illnesses are unavoidable.  That we will age, and that we cannot elude death.  These are the laws and conditions of human existence..."

Okay, despite what I said earlier, this was a good book and I do recommend it.

Lastly, I read The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I know that it has been a wildly popular book, but I just

didn't see it.  While it is not a bad book by any means, it just seemed like a very simple tale that could have been told as a short story.  Perhaps I am wrong. 

The Alchemist is the story of a young shepherd boy seeking treasure.  He travels around to find his treasure.  I won't share the ending (moral of the story), but just think Wizard of Oz.